Syrian migrants housed on Greek cruiseship to ease strain on Kos

The ship, chartered by the Greek government, is to provide accommodation for
around 2,500 Syrians in its cabins and an area for processing paperwork

Migrants watch the arrival of the Eleftherios Venizelos ferry at the port of Kos Photo: AFP

By Andrea Vogt, Bologna

5:42PM BST 16 Aug 2015

Thousands of Syrian migrants on the Greek island of Kos on Sunday began boarding a cruiseship that is to house and process them, in a bid to ease sometimes chaotic conditions onshore.

The Syrians will be housed in the Eleftherios Venizelos’s cabins as their paperwork is processed, said Greek authorities, who must first review permission requests before refugees can travel on to Athens.

In grim rescue operations Sunday, Italian and Norwegian navy personnel retrieved the bodies of 49 migrants found dead in the lower hold of an unseaworthy wooden boat north of Libya. More than 300 people were rescued alive from the upper deck, while those below perished from asphyxiation due to heat, poor ventilation and exhaust fumes in the squalid, stifling hold.

Italian Navy Ship Commander Massimo Tozzi described the grim scene to Italian media, noting the “strong emotional impact” on rescuers, who opened the hold to find the dead piled on top of each other and submerged in water, fuel and human excrement.

Approximately 2,300 people have died crossing the Mediterranean this year, in what EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos Friday described as “worst refugee crisis since the Second World War. ”

Most of the quarter of a million migrants who made it safely to Europe this year arrived on the shores of Italy and Greece. This week, Greek police struggled to keep order on the island of Kos with new refugees arriving daily by rubber dinghies from Turkey, a mere 4 kilometers away. The island has several thousand migrants camping out and staying in hotels, but tempers have flared as the numbers have swelled, worsening conditions and lengthening the wait for permission to leave.

According to Reuters, about 50 migrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran threw punches and stones in clashes Saturday outside the island's main police station. Earlier in the week, violence broke out in a sports stadium being used as a temporary holding centre.

Syrians fleeing from their country’s civil war are given processing priority because they have refugee status under international law. But migrants from many other poor, war-torn nations are also living on Kos with scarce food, water and shelter.

Sicily’s ports and temporary holding centers are also struggling to manage the crisis, with ships carrying hundreds of people—and often corpses—arriving daily. This weekend's survivors and victims are expected to arrive Monday in Catania, where the mayor has pledged to bury the dead in a local cemetery.

“Its clear the world cannot wait any longer to solve the Libyan crisis,” said Italy’s Interior Minister Angelino Alfano, warning that the latest tragedy would not be the last. “Libya is an active volcano right in front of Europe.”

Calling the migrant tragedies “a genocide against the Italian people,” Northern League leader Matteo Salvini on Sunday announced a three-day protest in September.